A game based on a mod of a game based on a mod of a game.

June 26, 2019 5:43 AM

What is an autobattler game? Get to know this new game genre. [Dot Esports] “What are these “auto-thing” games and why is everyone talking about them? Autobattlers came out of nowhere and skyrocketed in popularity as the rising video game genre of 2019. A few months after a Dota 2 fan-made mod called Dota Auto Chess found success in the genre, it died to give birth to two other titles, Auto Chess and Dota Underlords. Riot Games’ League of Legends mode Teamfight Tactics then appeared to fight them for players. Autobattlers are tactical strategy games with drafting elements from card games. Matches feature eight players and take place across several rounds. Players fight each other in one-vs-one matches defined at random. Players fight each other by placing a set number of units on a board as they wish. These units, or pieces, fight each other automatically when a round starts.” [YouTube][Dota Underlords Trailer][Teamfight Tactics Trailer][Auto Chess Trailer]

• A Guide To Auto Chess, 2019’s Most Popular New Game Genre [Kotaku]

“There is no great mystery as to how this genre took off. There’s now a well-oiled pipeline that helps propel these things into the zeitgeist. Steam’s Workshop gives exact numbers on how many people are subscribed to a certain mod. Twitch tells us how many viewers are watching people stream it. On both these platforms, games that do big numbers get more prominent placement. Media sites obsessively track these numbers and report irregularities and spikes. These processes and systems have been optimized even more than they were a couple of years ago, when PUBG came out of nowhere to turn battle royale games into a sensation. Popularity has always begotten more popularity, but now it does so in record time. It doesn’t hurt that, in the Fortnite era, players, streamers, reporters, developers, and business execs are all on the lookout for the next big thing. In Auto Chess, it’s possible they’ve found it.”

• Dota Underlords feels like a clone of Auto Chess [Polygon]

“Underlords is a better-looking game and it’s more stable, and getting into a match doesn’t take 10 minutes. It’s even a bit more accessible to new players, with flashy icons and easy-to-read text. While Underlords is instantly more appealing to new players, the similarities make it hard for veterans to see a reason to switch. Auto Chess fans have put up with a lot in the Dota 2 client, all with the understanding that it’s a mod held together by duct tape and prayers. But over the months, Drodo has improved Auto Chess dramatically, updating its units and systems. The main issue with Underlords right now is how similar it feels to Auto Chess from a few months ago. With the exception of three different units and presentational features, Underlords is nearly identical to Auto Chess. Most of the race or class benefits operate very similarly to the mod, and a majority of characters have the same abilities. Underlords feels like a small patch for Auto Chess, not its own game.”

• Teamfight Tactics is a super fun Auto Chess variant, despite frustrating RNG [PC Gamer]

“Teamfight Tactics has all of League of Legends’ combat flashiness and none of the stress of being personally responsible for making sure Draven catches his damn axes. You’re a spectator and the team's strategic master, cheering your units on as they rout your foes. When they lose, it’s just a momentary and transient setback—easy enough to upgrade something, add a B. F. Sword to your Gunslinger, and try again next round, all grievances forgotten with that next clinking rain of victory gold. Or perhaps it’s all part of your cunning plan to look weak, but have first-pick priority during the draft carousel to hog all of the Golden Spatulas and grow your bank to an enormous size, making you the first to field a massive nine or even 10-unit swarm of synergistic champions while everybody else still struggles to unlock their class passives. Teamfight needs work, but it's already a struggle worth enjoying, complex and satisfying.”

• Teamfight Tactics and Dota Underlords are just the start of a coming wave of autobattlers [PCGamesN]

“It’s almost as if history is repeating itself. Just like battle royale, the autobattler genre as we’ve seen it so far has a series of core principles which can be gently iterated to ensure a particular version can stand out from the crowd. These principles are easily transferable to different IPs, too. What’s more, development times appear to be relatively short, helping a genre built up by a dedicated modding community attract the attention of major publishers. Sound familiar? While a mainstream interest is yet to be fully proven, the doors are open for major studios to jump on the trend. If Valve and Riot can make their moves this quickly, it won’t be long before other developers follow suit: thanks to the diverse rosters of both Overwatch and Heroes of the Storm, Blizzard seems perfectly poised to take advantage; if MOBAs and hero-shooters are well equipped to lead the charge, then Hi-Rez’s Smite and Paladins are both likely contenders; even Nintendo is a possibility, as the original Auto Chess is said to have been built out of a Pokemon-themed Warcraft 3 mod.”

posted by Fizz (32 comments total)

Quill18: DOTA UNDERLORDS: A Tutorial for Complete Beginners.
posted by Pendragon at 5:58 AM on June 26, 2019 [1 favorite]

Those trailers are hilariously vague but still you had me at WALRUS PUNCH WALRUS PUNCH
posted by gwint at 6:39 AM on June 26, 2019 [1 favorite]

These existed back as original StarCraft mods. You built units that marched directly across the map and hit your enemies units. The trick was in countering what they were building or the counter to your own units.

They can be very relaxing in a way or kind of like rooting for a sports team (or gladiator fight, I guess). Weirdly, I was poking around Twitch which I don't often do and saw someone saying they were playing "$700 money matches" of Auto Chess which I now realize might have been that's how much you get to spend in game and not as I immediately assumed they were wagering $700 on each match, ha. That is old SC whatever that mod was called talk where they'd list the pool to spend in the game title.

So this is sure a memory hole I'm walking down.
posted by OnTheLastCastle at 6:44 AM on June 26, 2019 [1 favorite]

These existed back as original StarCraft mods.

Everything old is new again. Especially with game publishers that have $ in their eyes and see profit to be made with mobile devices and in-game micro-transactions and loot boxes. Sorry, I meant "surprise mechanics".

I haven't had a chance to test out Auto Chess or Dota Underlords but I installed them on my phone and plan on checking them out a bit later tonight. I am intrigued by the "chess" like factor of the game, which I guess is more focused on the set up and strategy prior to letting your minions fight.
posted by Fizz at 6:50 AM on June 26, 2019

Everything old is new again.

Heh, my very first thought on seeing this (before reading a little further) was... oh this generation is doing "Core War / RoboWar" again - but I was wrong, seeing things through my grandpa glasses.
posted by jkaczor at 7:01 AM on June 26, 2019 [3 favorites]

Also, that Dota Underlords video that Pendragon links to by Quill18, references that playing online against 7 other people is very fun and easy. There's no chat, so toxic commentary is not going to happen, everyone is focused on their own board and you don't really have to feel embarrassed if you don't know what you're doing (which if you're like me can sometimes be what turns you off of online gameplay). There's also the option to play against 7 other bots if you truly don't want to play with other humans in multiplayer.

These are all awesome features that make playing less stressful and I'm all about that kind of gaming life.
posted by Fizz at 7:05 AM on June 26, 2019 [3 favorites]

I mean, I think those SC mods became DotA which then begat League of Legends. These might be like a mashup of those + those sort of cookie clicker games that just do most things for you. I'm curious but should probably avoid these.
posted by OnTheLastCastle at 7:07 AM on June 26, 2019

As someone who used to work in games, I love these extremely weird and popular mods of mods of mods that redefine the entire industry for 6 months, despite being obtuse, weird, "boring" and unfriendly. It really drives home that, no matter how professionalized games get, no matter how focus tested and watered down, there will always be something weird and new that makes the suits scramble to play catch-up.
posted by Reyturner at 7:34 AM on June 26, 2019 [3 favorites]

I've managed to basically sidestep the entire MOBA gauntlet over the years, maybe the most significant genre development in games that I managed to just never even dip a toe into. I didn't like playing RTSes, for one thing, but then MOBAs hit my radar late and by then already had a reputation as a kind of twitch- and knowledge-driven, socially-hostile "your own team will yell at you" multiplayer context that had me just noping back out before I even got in.

And now this blooming genre of fire-and-forget squad-building stuff is so very much more up my alley structurally and I think I will have to check it out when I have the spare time and headspace to learn something new. It's like some secret part of DOTA wanted me to show up after all, one way or another.
posted by cortex at 7:36 AM on June 26, 2019 [2 favorites]

but I installed them on my phone

oh no
posted by cortex at 7:44 AM on June 26, 2019 [4 favorites]

I've played a handful of rounds in DOTA Underlords. IT really does feel like a Warcraft 3 mod to me. I mean, DOTA2 wholecloth feels like a Warcraft 3 mod, it's bizarre how little the big Warcraft 3 DOTA clones still look so much like rip-offs. Playing Underlords there wasn't any unit I couldn't identify with a Warcraft 3 equivalent.

Teamfight Tactics looks like it has some neat differences to it from Underlords, but supporting Riot it bad. I know most gamers do not give a single solitary shit about the ethical treatment of game workers, but for me Riot is too far into the "shitty company" spectrum for me to support their projects at this time.

I think we will get a glut of these autobattler games, there's plenty of room for variation but it'll probably come down to one or two after the dust settles. I already kind of long for the the more organized play of an autobattler game that's also a tower-defense-war. Legion TD is the perfect example. You work with 3 others against a team of four opposing you, waves of enemies spawn and anything that gets past your defense has to face what survived on your team before core damage is taken.

A big issue I can see preventing these games from taking over completely is that right now they're very slow and require intermittent attention. There's a lot of time spent waiting after you've already made your strategic decisions. At first glance, perfect game to split attention with, you can literally go AFK and come back and the game is still going and you're losing, but you can still turn it around. Playing optimally though you'd need to watch the fights to see what's working and how positioning is working or not. These games tend to run upwards of 40 minutes, and that's just to the point of sifting down to the final half of opponents sometimes. The whole format with 9 players feels a bit bloated and there's almost always at least one quit/disconnect. For mobile gamers, it seems like it would be hard to find an unbroken 45-hour period to set aside on a lunch break to play one damn match.
posted by GoblinHoney at 7:48 AM on June 26, 2019

I didn't like playing RTSes, for one thing, but then MOBAs hit my radar late and by then already had a reputation

Yeah, I'm definitely not a fan of this genre of video games. All the lanes, the team-work, it's just not me. I'm a solo gamer who wants to do my own thing. This is more my jam where I can just make some decisions and watch things play out and then make more decisions. The "chess" part of this game is what intrigues me most.
posted by Fizz at 7:52 AM on June 26, 2019 [3 favorites]

This reminds me of how I like to play Madden - just call the plays and let the computer handle the gameplay. Pretend I'm just the coach.

(I know about Head Coach. I don't have an original XBox and it isn't ported XBox 360.)
posted by charred husk at 7:53 AM on June 26, 2019 [2 favorites]

just call the plays and let the computer handle the gameplay.

I was going to say, there are a ton of "Manager" type of games for all kinds of sports that let you do just this. You get to just focus on the math and the numbers and the deep meta of it all. I see why these types of games scratch certain itches.
posted by Fizz at 7:57 AM on June 26, 2019

My fav hearthstone player Kripparian has been playing / uploading videos for both. A lot of the HS folks are playing the autochess games. I must say that I think TFT looks much more polished. This could just be because I used to play LoL and I have all of the stuff memorized though.

Looks like TFT is out of beta today, so I'll definitely be giving this a shot!
posted by lazaruslong at 8:25 AM on June 26, 2019

If we want to play manager games, we need to be solidifying bloodline claims to other duchies in Crusader Kings 2. Damnit, I'm not allowed to think of Crusader Kings 2 or I get a certain want inside me that echoes.
posted by OnTheLastCastle at 8:41 AM on June 26, 2019

Is this like "Strategery"? I love that game.
posted by bleep at 8:43 AM on June 26, 2019

The first time I heard of this genre it was described as “Auto Chess clones” or just “Auto Chess games” and I really wanted it to be an entire sub-genre of chess games featuring cars.
posted by Holy Zarquon's Singing Fish at 9:41 AM on June 26, 2019 [2 favorites]

When I was a wee gamer I saved up all my bicycle delivery boy money for two months to buy a copy of Archon. I'm not sure if it was the very first "what if chess men fought like for real?" game but it was close. And it was good. (What came before Archon? I keep thinking of the Holochess scene in Star Wars.)

But unlike the autobattlers you actually controlled the pieces during the combat. That led to the game's weakness; it was pretty easy to win the tactical combat game with any piece, so instead of playing a strategic chess game you'd just get the one piece you knew how to use well and hop it all over the board winning every fight. Still it was super exciting.

A few years later Battle Chess came along and was popular. I never got it. It's literally just regular chess, except instead of captures you have to wait through a long and repetitive animation of the fight between two pieces. But the outcome was predetermined so it was just a movie.
posted by Nelson at 10:02 AM on June 26, 2019 [7 favorites]

Slight derail: @Nelson, I think I still have a 5 1⁄4 floppy with Battle Chess on it. I love the animations for that game. It was delightful to play and I have very fond memories of that game. You're not wrong about the animations just eating up time you could otherwise be playing the game. But it made Chess more appealing to me and I felt like I was playing war. I learned how to play Chess because of this game. Thanks for the lovely trip back into my past. :)
posted by Fizz at 10:16 AM on June 26, 2019 [2 favorites]

@Nelson I was so excited for both of those games but neither were quite what I'd dreamed of. Unfortunately these games do nothing whatsoever to scratch the videogame-chess itch. I'd love for a normal chess game except the pieces battle and while the attacking player gets a massive advantage, still a chance for the defender to survive or at least deal attrition damage. Seems like such a straight forward idea, maybe people have tried it and it wasn't that fun or the balance was too weird.
posted by GoblinHoney at 10:24 AM on June 26, 2019 [1 favorite]

Seems weird to call these autobattlers to me. The battling part really seems secondary to me, like the game could probably just resolve it instantly based on the unit stats and positioning. The games are really about the drafting and placement strategy. They are much more like playing deckbuilding games like Ascension or Star Realms than anything else.

I'm actually looking forward to when the first developer of one of these games starts applying some lessons learned from the board game world. These types of drafting/deckbuilding games have been evolving for 10 years now and autobattlers could be a lot more interesting if they lifted some ideas. Right now it really feels like they are re-inventing the wheel and I am left a little unsatisfied by the games.
posted by forbiddencabinet at 10:26 AM on June 26, 2019

Battle Chess was wonderful, but its primary contribution to gaming was the Duck, which developers of all kinds - particularly concept artists and game systems prototypers - have been using to push their creative vision through the production bureaucracy unscathed since the late 80s.
posted by Ryvar at 10:38 AM on June 26, 2019 [6 favorites]

I love the fast cycles of games!

I am curious if non-e-sports also have fast cycles like this. Is there a form of football that quickly sweeps through all the neighborhood football clubs, changes the industry, and then gets replaced by the next thing?

I've seen futsal and pickleball courts installed in local parks. Maybe something like that?
posted by rebent at 11:02 AM on June 26, 2019 [1 favorite]

I love the fast cycles of games!

I think what I find most interesting is how well suited this genre of game is for mobile devices. Battle Royale (while still around) is starting to really lose its shine. And it's important to remember that both PUBG & Fortnite ended up being ported to mobile devices and that was big turning point in capturing a larger segment of the market.

We're going to have a glut of these kinds of games flood the mobile market on both Android/iOS/Switch because there is a desire for gaming while on the go. I'm kind of glad though, because many gamers like to sneer and look down at mobile gaming. They consider it to be somehow less of a game than playing on a console or a PC. But that's changing because there's just so many more people who are now able to game.

The downside of this is that these games are being crafted with loot-boxes & micro-transactions. But from a purely platform standpoint, we're seeing a shift. Mobile gaming is only going to get stronger.
posted by Fizz at 11:58 AM on June 26, 2019

Impressions from a few bot matches in Underlords:

Matches are very long, but you only make a choice or two every 30ish seconds. So it's 40 minutes of occasionally nudging your team one way or another. It feels like an idle/clicker game crossed with some ancient drafting game, but unlike a true clicker I can't go away and come back because the 30 second window is too short. It's also not short enough to really hold my attention, to be honest.

I might try playing a few more times, but so far it's not gelling for me. I agree with forbiddencabinet. The "drafting" layer is very shallow compared to modern board games.
posted by Anonymous Function at 1:11 PM on June 26, 2019 [1 favorite]

So I decided I was going to try Dota Underlords just now despite really not being sure what the hell genre Dota *is* (it is a "MOBA" but I have still never been clear on what one of those is, attempts to make sense of it just slip right off of the surface of my brain without sticking, it is kind of amazing how much my brain just Does Not Want To Know What A Moba Is, Something About Lanes And Being An Angry Sweary Guy I Guess?).

And then it asks me if it's okay to do a 454 megabyte update as its first act after downloading it and, sheesh.

I guess it's done with that because now the tablet is just sitting there chanting RAMBO RAMBO SI! RAMBO! or some other pseudo-latinate gibberish...
posted by egypturnash at 1:47 PM on June 26, 2019 [1 favorite]

I just played sixteen rounds of the Dota Underlords tutorial and I have absolutely no idea what happened. The tutorial just kinda stopped telling me what to do after three rounds, and I ended up with this giant row of little guys at the bottom of my screen jumping up and down and making annoying HISST noises. I could pick three or four of them to drag onto the board and get slaughtered by the bot during a boring little sequence where everyone stood there and played combat animations, and moved around sometimes with no clear cause.

Am I supposed to be intimately familiar with all different these units from playing Dota for the past decade or something? They have all these little icons in their stats but if I tap the icons then nothing comes up to tell me what they mean.

I have seen many game tutorials in my time and I think I am safe in saying that Dota Underlords's tutorial is one of the bad ones.

Overall this reminds me of nothing more than the time I tried playing Magic: The Gathering and was left thoroughly befuddled by its "instructions" consisting of a fold-out poster that was more invested in emphasizing that You Are A Planeswalker! than telling me how the game actually worked or anything.

I think I will pass on this bold new e-sport.
posted by egypturnash at 2:17 PM on June 26, 2019 [1 favorite]

For folks wanting some more detailed chatter on gameplay nitty gritty, here's a periodic reminder about a nice little sister-community called mefightclub, which is run by and populated in significant part by MetaFilter folks. There's a current Auto Chess etc. thread that might scratch some "what's going on with this" itches. Requires an account to read thread (and to contribute to 'em, obvs), but it's a quick free sign-up and a nice, MeFi-like place for gaming-related chatter.
posted by cortex at 2:29 PM on June 26, 2019 [2 favorites]

but the game wasn't a good fit for me simply because there was a huge number of plays and I wasn't sure which one was best. But still fun as I lost many games

The trick is to pick a set 15-20 plays that work to the strengths of your players, and use those with a few extra "surprise" plays in for special situations. Don't try to learn or use it all. This is true of real-life football as well. It fits my nerdy need to write down "I called this play, this is what the down and distance was, how many yards did I get" obsessiveness. I also do that in Madden. I am a tremendous dork.
posted by Abehammerb Lincoln at 4:59 PM on June 26, 2019

The "drafting" layer is very shallow compared to modern board games.

It's actually pretty functional... as I understand it, the major decision points are -

1) Alliances - each hero has 2 or more alliances which give you bonuses to fielding more of them. Figuring out what is "workable, given the draft I have been given so far and what the 7 other players are doing" isn't trivial.

2) Economy - you earn money through getting win streaks, loss streaks, and floating money and earning interest on it. There is an inherent tension between spending money to defend a win streak, and floating money to earn interest while earning a loss streak (and losing hp). This is a classic "minimum spend" problem analysis - you never want to overspend (because you're giving up interest income) so you need to make the judgement of how much is "enough" to maintain your win-streak, or how much to lose by - the worse your loss, the more hp damage you take, so you might deploy better units to the board, yet you don't want to "win" accidentally because it cancels your streak. Worst that can happen is to flip flop between winning / losing so you never earn streaks, in a sense this is like Hearts. I think this is the hardest part - you basically decide whether to commit to a win or loss streak and at what point you switch gears, and how much to spend to maintain those streaks.

3) Sideboard - You can speculatively buy units to put on your sideboard and you sell them back for the same price so they're "free" - it increases the likelihood of drafting synergies in future rounds but you lose interest income. It's an intangible form of spending.

4) Common draft pool - watching what other players draft informs you of the likelihood of drafting certain pieces (if everyone is drafting Knights it may get difficult to find them), and also informs what counter-strategies you will go for and need to sideboard for.

5) Leveling up your character - you spend money to level up your character which allows you to field more units to the board and unlocks access higher tier heroes in the draft. This costs your economy (lower gold floated) and also dilutes the likelihood of lower tier heroes, which means it can be hard to finish lower tier sets.

6) Positioning / items - correct / incorrect positioning can win or lose the game on its own.

7) When to reroll - you can spend 2 gold to reroll your draft, it's true money down the drain (every other way of spending money contributes permanently to your total power), so it's only done sparingly but can be a powerful tool.

8) Time constraints - 30-40 seconds is definitely not enough time in the late game when you are dealing with multiple re-rolls and repositioning / sideboarding, especially because that's when you make the decision to go "all in" and dump all your gold into the game and forgo all future interest income because the game is in its end stages. Sometimes one player goes all in while the other holds back and then if the first player can't win right away, the second will almost certainly win later.
posted by xdvesper at 8:43 PM on June 26, 2019 [1 favorite]

I've been playing TFT since it came out of beta 2 days ago. It's really fun! Still very much a beta-level game tho - needs some work. But yeah, super fun.
posted by lazaruslong at 10:57 AM on June 28, 2019